About 18 months ago, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) embarked on an effort to identify its major research needs to guide technical aspects of our Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) and NGA research as a whole. The agency developed six portfolio areas:

Exploration of new phenomenologies. Exploits the full potential of new national, commercial, airborne and ground technologies and transitions applications to the National System for Geospatial Intelligence to address enduring hard problems for the intelligence community and the military.

Geospatial intelligence analytics. Enables analysts to quickly process voluminous and heterogeneous data to determine their significance, extract relevant information, and discover subtle patterns that might be critical to solving pressing intelligence problems.

Multi-source and multi-INT fusion. Fuses information from multiple sensors, sources and disciplines which can dramatically improve the ability to detect, locate and track objects.

Integrated problem-driven collection. Aims to perform necessary research, modeling and simulation to answer tough collection questions such as source combinations, revisit rates and automation.

Automated image and geospatial data understanding. Helps develop new approaches to automated or assisted understanding of imagery and geospatial data to provide orders-of-magnitude improvements in such parameters as processing time, error rates, sensitivity, throughput, information extraction, geolocation accuracy, latency, conflation and analyst efficiency.

Geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) enablers. These are the critical foundation for the first five portfolios. The GEOINT enablers include information-technology monitoring; leveraging user laboratories and infrastructure; verification and validation activities; technology insertion and transition activities; and Web services development.

It is important to keep in mind that although the six portfolios represent the major focus of NGA research and work, NGA does not rule out researching other relevant areas to improve and advance GEOINT.

Here, we briefly describe four of our CRADAs that address numerous portfolio research areas:

ITT Visual Information Solutions. This CRADA with ITT Corp. is now in its seventh year. Its purpose is to integrate government-developed algorithms into ENVI software modules, expand the capability of ENVI software modules to address various source data ingest and archive functions, and develop user interfaces and processing flows to facilitate advanced exploitation and deployment of Interactive Data Language-based applications to a service-oriented architecture. Throughout this CRADA numerous accomplishments have occurred in the areas of new algorithm development or insertion (government-developed tools inserted into commercial software), tool improvements, data ingest, data export and training. This CRADA also allows NGA to have a strong voice in shaping the ENVI/IDL product roadmap. It also helps ITT stay up-to-date with regard to NGA’s technology roadmap to more effectively plan for NGA’s future needs. Under this CRADA, the ITT team provides one-day seminars at corporate or government sites to familiarize users with various software modules or tools.

ERDAS CRADA. This agreement was established nearly 10 years ago between NGA and ERDAS Inc. Its primary purpose has been to improve the ERDAS remote sensing product line to better support the NGA mission. Accomplishments include thorough support for processing and exploitation of NGA datasets, the Imagizer viewer bundled with NGA foundation products, and numerous enhancements to the Imagine GLT viewer. Future activities will include enhancement of production capabilities for certified Controlled Image Base; insertion of additional NGA capabilities, such as digital elevation model tools; transformation of sophisticated geoprocessing capabilities into Open Geospatial Consortium compliant Web processing service; development of automated analytic exploitation models; improvements on integrating data from new sensors and new datasets; development of advanced multi-dimensional temporal visualization for multi-INT fusion; and ongoing education and training cooperation.

Transforming Operations and Production to Services (TOPS). This CRADA with BAE Systems is different from prior NGA CRADAs in that it is researching ways to transform geospatial workflows and business processes in a services environment. The research plan for this CRADA has three broad research areas: business flow, open and commodity data utilization, and SOA technology evaluation. This CRADA provides for the participation of third-party industry and government organizations if they can contribute in any of these research areas.

ESRI CRADA. NGA input and testing has led to several enhancements to the ESRI company’s Production Line Tool Set (PLTS) GIS Data ReViewer software, and the Positional Accuracy Assessment Tool (PAAT). These tools were designed for assessing quality, assigning accuracy values, and fixing errors in the NGA production environment, but have also found wide applicability for many other government and commercial production environments. Future enhancements to ReViewer under the CRADA will include new quality checks, statistical sampling capability, more reporting functionality and GUI redesign. Another component of this CRADA is reciprocal training. Each year, instructors at NGA College sites around the country are able to participate in ESRI instructor-led training courses. In exchange, NGA College makes its GEODDUC (Geospatial Digital Data Users Course) available to ESRI personnel. Also under this CRADA, NGA and ESRI may exchange personnel for a defined period of time.

NGA has successfully implemented these and other CRADAs to deliver benefits to our analyst customers who are delivering GEOINT products and services to our troops and decision makers. NGA will continue this work, and the agency is interested in forming additional CRADAs with industry and academia.

The authors are experts with the U.S. National-Geospatial Intelligence Agency. NGA’s CRADA staff can be reached at crada@nga.mil.